Facts

Numbers

The core of the Band is the Band staph, of which there are currently 27, plus the Tree and the five Dollies. Attendance by others is completely voluntary, so the number of people at any event varies, but for football games we scatter with 100 to 150 men. Or women. Approximately 40 bandfolk cheer on the women’s volleyball and men’s and women’s basketball teams each and every game.150 – the approximate number of events the Band performed at between September 2014 and June 2015, not counting rehearsals and such things. Put into context, we have more Band events during the academic year than we have school days.

This includes such varied activities as watching the football team kick Cal’s ass, watching the men’s basketball team kick Cal’s ass, watching the women’s basketball team kick Cal’s ass (and most everyone else’s, for that matter), and so on.

69- number of songs in the folder. We always carry enough to make sure that we never play the same song twice in one day.

50 – Number of years we’ve been the way we are! We re-formed (or reformed, depending on your point of view) as a scatter band in 1963, and since then we’ve been crazy, fun-loving, and always scattering at the drop of a white fishing hat with some red ribbon and loads of pins on it.

‘bout 350 – pretty much our answer to everything.

3 – the number of Shaks we’ve had.

13 – the number of varsity and club sports that the Band has supported at games in the past two years, from field hockey to ice hockey.

Myths

The Stanford Band is filled with socially unaware, intoxicated hedonists bent on the destruction of our social values.Come now! We pride ourselves on being a socially aware organization. For example, in 1990, we used our field show at the University of Oregon to call attention to the plight of the spotted owl. As for the drinking, the Stanford Band voluntarily gives its members JEDI* Training each year on the responsibilities and risks of drinking alcohol. As for the whole “hedonism” thing… well, we ARE in the Bay Area, California. It’s a virtual Sodom and Gomorrah out here!*Joint Education on the Dangers of Intoxication

The Stanford Band has been banned (haha!) from the State of Oregon.Well, they didn’t like the field show. But it turns out that you can’t really ban an organization from crossing into your state unless they’ve been committing crimes and things. Pesky First Amendment. Governor Neil Goldschmidt tried to ban us from the state of Oregon, but look what happened to him. We’ve since been back.

The Dollies are Stanford's Cheerleaders.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! The Athletic Department has its own cheerleaders, and they can keep them. The Dollies are the Band’s five-woman dance team. They're ours, and you can’t have them.

The Stanford Band was suspended once upon a time after members urinated on the field during a halftime show.We do not pee on the field; we leave that to the University of Washington football team. But in all honesty, this never happened. We like to drop our pants on the field – always while wearing underwear – for comedic effect, and people got confused.

The Stanford Band was banned from certain airlines for attempting to tip the plane mid-flight by running from side-to-side across the rows.False! Our propagandists are just too good. The best part about this story is that the U$C band tried this after hearing the story. Poor pitiful children.The Stanford Band is a bunch of bigots who hate Irish people.We in the Stanford Band are not bigots. In fact, we make it our mission to attack prejudice and inequality wherever we encounter it, using the only weapons available to us: loud music and burning political satire. It just so happened that in the 1990s, we noticed that the mascot of the University of Notre Dame, the Fighting Irish, was a caricatured stereotype of the Irish and Irish-Americans. Irish people do more than fight, and the name Fighting Irish is just as inappropriate as the name Getting-Invaded-All-The-Time French. We lampooned this fact with a show called "These Irish, Why Must They Fight" but it seems to have gotten misinterpreted (we think they had a hard time hearing it because they were booing so hard) and since then, we have generally been detested as bigots by Notre Dame fans and alumni. It’s a shame, ain’t it?

The Stanford Band improperly rushed the field and interfered with play at the end of the 1982 Big Game.False! The game was over. His knee was down.The Band served for a brief time as Mitt Romney’s communications director during his presidential campaign.Um, not at all. But he does like our jokes.The Band Played Outside of OJ Simpson’s Trial in 1994.Actually, it was just a group of members that ditched field rehearsal (truants!) and it was just OJ’s arraignment. They may or may not have played "She’s Not There" by the Zombies, but hey, it was a long time ago, and he got off (at least that time). The current members of the band were still wetting their beds when this happened, so get off our case, Johnnie Cochran.The Band was not allowed to do a halftime field show at the 2011 Orange Bowl because LeBron's ego couldn't handle the field show they had planned.False. Neither Stanford nor Virginia Tech played a field show: the Goo Goo Dolls played the halftime show. Given the chance, though, we probably would have insulted LeBron.